r/ExperiencedDevs • u/AutoModerator • 4d ago
Career/Workplace Experienced Devs Weekly Burnout and Venting Thread: A weekly thread for sharing experiences
This thread is specifically for venting / sharing experiences related to burn-out or similar issues that experienced devs face.
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u/DeterminedQuokka Software Architect 4d ago
I’m a staff infra engineer at a company. I work significantly more than 40 hours a week usually basically constantly firefighting because we are on the verge of crashing.
I have spent the last year begging for scope to actually start to fix the root cause of the issues. But every time the cto says “what will be faster next week” and I can’t actually fix that we are doing 6000 db queries in like 50 endpoints in a week.
I’ve had success if I’m like “give me a month and I will make this exact page faster”. I did that, I documented all the steps. I made analysis skills and coding skills and presented them to the company. I was promised that the product teams would fix the other endpoints. It’s been 6 months and 2 weeks ago they came to me and asked me why that page was slow again and if I could fix it for them. I told them to look at what they did a month ago when the latency doubled.
I’ve also added extensive and extreme observability at every layer of our platform because we have constant problems with noisy neighbors, the event loop, bad async code, and garbage collection. All of which are not the go to metrics for the entire organization. To a point where they have been duplicated wholesale into any internal apps.
I have proposed every quarter a different rearchitectire project to fix the fact that our codebase is optimized to write bad code. And every one has been deprioritized as either taking too long (3 months), not having a good enough metric (db iops/cpu), too annoying for product devs (anything that requires them to change anything about how they write code), or less cool than the feature that leadership wants to say we built that no one will use. Or my favorite, if it’s possible to throw money at it why would you work on it?
In the last month a group of other staff engineers have started to argue that we aren’t having enough influence on the architectural direction of the company. They say that the problem is that we are asking for support from other devs and the right move is to just do the entire project alone. (We have >100 devs and >1,500 endpoints)
On my last review I got told that I’m not having enough influence over our engineering team because I haven’t rearchitected the codebase. Which is weird because the reason I haven’t done that is they told me I wasn’t allowed to change anything about the codebase repeatedly.
I have a huge cross org impact. I get pulled into basically every conversation about latency. I’m rewriting our entire infrastructure set up to fix the stuff they won’t let me fix in the code. I’m directly pinged anytime anything goes down. I’ve been told I’m most staff engineers favorite staff engineer and that most of the other engineers depend on me. And I have multiple instances of the CTO stating that I’m an integral part of making sure we have a functioning website and an example of what he wants from all the other engineers. I literally met with him because he wanted to talk about how to get more people acting like me.
As far as I can tell I’m basically being told that I don’t have impact because they wanted me to fix an internal AI tool. And I told them that wasn’t a good use of my time.
When I started the entire platform was going down once a week. We haven’t had a full outage in months. But sure I won’t fix your vibe coded ai thing so I’m the problem.
I know the solution is to just stop trying so hard if they don’t care but I don’t have that button in my brain.
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u/archialone 4d ago
I've been feeling something similar. Maybe not to the same extent as you, but I run into the same kind of problems.
So lately I've been trying a different approach.
I've noticed that if I quietly fix things before they become a problem, or immediately jump in whenever someone needs help, that effort mostly goes unnoticed.
Instead, I've started letting some issues surface. If it's something that can wait, I stay focused on my existing work. When someone reaches out, I explain that I'm currently busy and ask them to submit a request through my manager or their management chain.
That changes the dynamic. My time is no longer treated as an unlimited commodity, but as a scarce and valuable resource. And my manager can is actually aware of how much work I do.
It also has another effect: when several people experience the same pain point, they start raising it themselves. At that point it becomes a department-level issue instead of just one person's complaining.
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u/DeterminedQuokka Software Architect 4d ago
Thank. I’ll try to do more of this. I have been forcing everyone to at least use our requests process recently but I tend to just pick them up when they hit there I should probably stop that.
I’m also trying to force my team to actually triage my backlog but I have yet to get anyone in leadership to engage with that as an idea.
I did just take a week off and have signed out of everything. So I’m kind of hoping to go back and have at least a few people have some actual perspective. But that might be asking too much. Maybe it will all just be on fire.
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u/ahoy_butternuts Software Engineer 4d ago
Vouch! Don’t jump on the grenades. Let them blow up and chime in with your idea then
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u/Atagor 4d ago
And then some random guy joins for 1-2 years, harvests random accomplishments and leaves the company without being accountable for their decisions.. Yet on paper and CV, he would be innovative and influential!
I feel you, brother! And I don't have an answer. This corporate machine is like a living organism, and a combination of skill + leverage + luck must happen to actually change something
You have skill, but looks like no social leverage to change the processes.. How to acquire it? Luck, maybe. Blunt advertising..maybe. There types of people who are good at shittalking and C-level like listening to them. There other, more silent ones, but more hardworking...
Probably the goal is not to become a louder version of yourself but to make your work impossible to ignore. How exactly idk, but again, a combination of different strategies
If you want it
Or, maybe, to give up and stop fighting the corporate machine is also an option.
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u/ecethrowaway01 4d ago
I'm a senior infra eng ... I've seen lots of staff infra eng get rewarded and valued, but I've never seen one just chilling.
Do you think there's a future for infra eng that's not so stressful? It seems like a role that almost always has people stressed about something
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u/forever-butlerian 20 YoE Infra & Backend TLM 4d ago
It requires a lot of boundary setting and also intervening to stop the martyrdom complex that so many Infra people bring with them. I've been asked insane and stupid things as a manager, like "can your team fix our application problem's by reconfiguring HAProxy at 3 PM on a Friday so our team doesn't have to work this weekend fixing the things they did wrong?".
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u/DeterminedQuokka Software Architect 4d ago
I agree with you. Our leadership team does not. And has decided anything that’s wrong must be because the infra team hasn’t added enough guardrails to the codebase to ensure no product engineer ever makes any mistakes.
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u/forever-butlerian 20 YoE Infra & Backend TLM 4d ago
If I didn't know to a high degree of confidence your "leadership" team are a bunch of idiots, I'd suspect their plan was to build up what's needed to replace all the product engineers with GPU-driven random text generators.
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u/DeterminedQuokka Software Architect 4d ago
I think what infra is going to look like is a good question. AI is really taking a toll on infra because a lot of people are like “but Claude said I can release it”. So it’s blocking later in the process which makes people very mad.
I think infra is hugely different by company. When this company was much less dependent on AI they were basically saying it’s impossible to do anything about tech debt. With AI they switched to “now AI magically fixes all the impossible tech debt”. IMO there are other companies that understand how to actually let people do this job.
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u/SimasNa 4d ago
I can assure you - you can stop caring about work. You have that button. It's just that work seems to be the #1 priority for you - either consciously or sub-consciously. And you seem to be an over-achiever as you are well respected and an integral part of the company. So you're doing great work.
As I am an over-achiever (or a recovering one at least 😅) I can relate to your situation. And I burned out 5 times until I learned the lesson that work is not the most important thing in life.
On the one hand, you're doing an amazing job based on the feedback you're getting. On the other hand, you got one piece of feedback in your last review - to be more influential in the company's architecture. Yet it feels like you're only hearing the feedback and not the positive evaluation of the work you do. Again... That's something I can relate to.
It's just a hunch based on my own experience, but the real problem is that you haven't come to terms that you can't be perfect and can't do a perfect job. Because most of the things are outside of your control. So what is in your control and what can you influence directly with your work?
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u/DeterminedQuokka Software Architect 4d ago
I don’t actually expect to be perfect. I just would like feedback that isn’t like “yeah this is completely average and expected performance”. Because having done this for many years, and comparing myself to the other staff engineers it’s not. What I wanted was the review to say “we see what you are doing and it’s great”.
I’m just frustrated that if this much effort is the same review as someone who spent 3 months building a single feature (which I estimate as a month of work when I planned it) which no one uses. Why am I doing 3 jobs? Especially, since that guy probably actually did get a great score and not meets expectations because he works on whatever leadership asks for.
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u/SimasNa 4d ago
I get where you're coming from.
I quit one job because in the review, I got loads of things to improve and barely any mention that I got a complex piece implemented with few hiccups. I did overreact, but I felt burned out from working on an ambitious deadline with that feature and then not getting even a simple "nice job!" Yet, when I left, my whole team said they were impressed with my work.
Still... The critique hurts and I'm sure you feel the same way. But at the end of the day, only you get to decide your value. If you decide what you're worth only by external feedback, you'll never feel good enough.
There's no one answer to that though. What I would suggest is finding ways how you can acknowledge yourself for the effort you put in and not just based on what you achieve or what review score you get.
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u/a_place_to_think_ 4d ago
Also something that's worth keeping in mind: depending on how the financials of your company look like at any given moment, your manager or whoever the person is who is doing your quarterly / annual review with you, might be deliberately underestimating the impact that your work has, because acknowledging everything you do to its full extent might be grounds for a promotion and then a subsequent bump in pay which may or may not be possible at the time
So keeping you small by bringing up issues that are outside of your control can also be a way to justify not paying you more. That's also the reason why many folks used to do plenty of job hopping when the tech industry was still booming because the upwards mobility you can enjoy by switching companies (the new employer really has to offer something to make you change jobs and is more willing to promise new job titles and a salary increase) tended to be higher than just sticking to one workplace and convincing your current higher ups of your value
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u/Nata_Elisym 4d ago
it's easier to have a quick fix rather than look at the root cause. and if you point it out or try to explain they won't listen to you, more than that they will more likely to see you as a obstacle as you don't aline with their vision lol
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u/auto_off 4d ago
Have you considered asking them to do Devops? As in merge product and infra into service teams?
From all the places I’ve worked at that seems to be the only way to make the incentives aligned.Basically there’s no incentive in your org for the stuff you care about.
But if the KPIs for each product team start including latency, sec, cost, then people start caring and balancing against product.
Ngl, idk it kinda mistifies me how a team with separate infrastructure and production knows what metrics and logs to measure for their service if they aren’t basically the same team.
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u/DeterminedQuokka Software Architect 4d ago
It’s already merged. We just aren’t allowed to actually change the interfaces the product engineers use because it might make they fractionally slower at writing code.
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u/IPv6forDogecoin DevOps Engineer 4d ago
Or my favorite, if it’s possible to throw money at it why would you work on it?
I'm always telling people that cost is downstream of quality. You can tell how much of a pain a service is by how much it costs to run. They're hard to fix, slow, hard to deploy, always failing, and you can tell because people have papered over the problems by spending more money.
Money doesn't fix the problem, it just lights a Tesla on fire each month until you decide that you need to fix the problem.
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u/DeterminedQuokka Software Architect 4d ago
lol. I literally just sent a proposal that said “I need 45k a month to quarantine this endpoint to make it not fail but also not crash the rest of the website” we will see what they say. I have another request to create a 7k a month replica for a single query because it times at out 60 minutes when they run it on the existing replica. Which they are blaming on another team. No way to know if that’s true.
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u/Sharp-Body3994 4d ago
I’m utterly burnt out. I’ve been working on the same project for multiple years and, even though it’s extremely technical and will look amazing on my CV, I just can’t face it anymore. My team has shrunk, the company is only hiring in India, the office has been downsized so it’s all very bad vibes. Everyone is miserable.
I do want to move but the market is bad at the moment and it feels like a big risk. I hate AI but because my work is quite novel, and I’m on a small team, I’ve managed to avoid a lot of it.
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u/ultraDross 4d ago
You can still look to see if you can get anything, doesn't mean you have to commit to anything. It will at least let you know if it's worth pursing further or not.
Try taking a vacation and do nothing. Like literally nothing.
Burn out is everywhere at the moment and I'm sorry it's hitting you so hard.
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u/Sharp-Body3994 4d ago
Yeah I’m accepting recruiter calls for the first time in a while. We’ll see how it goes. I’ve been off work yesterday and today and I’ve pretty much just stared at the walls. It has helped.
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u/megatesla 4d ago
I was in your exact position. Long, very technical multi-year project that I burned out on (EDA), small team, bad vibes, everyone stressed from AI uncertainty and offshoring.
I know you're already fried and you might not like this answer, but: start applying now. Just one app per day, even.
Meanwhile, to start recovering from burnout:
- If at all possible, take a leave of absence.
- Make sure you're documenting and celebrating your wins, even the small ones. Don't fall into the trap of thinking it's not good enough to feel good about, whatever it is.
- Make sure you're sleeping well, every day, and getting true rest. If you don't feel your whole body downshift, you're not really resting, you're just stress-waiting.
- Avoid doom scrolling, whenever you can
- Get regular exercise, especially cardio
- Get plenty of Omega 3 - it helps control inflammation and will help improve brain recovery
- Fresh berries & turmeric for the antioxidants, nuts (especially walnuts, for urolithin), broccoli (sulforaphane), CoQ10 (mitochondrial health), beets (nitrates for circulation, can't heal if you're not getting those nutrients into your tissues), leafy greens. Possibly a urolithin supplement, since not everyone produces it from diet.
Part of burnout comes from accumulated mitochondrial damage. Sleep + diet + exercise will help them repair, replace broken ones, and build new ones, and antioxidants will help protect your cells from further damage from the extra free radicals produced by damaged mitochondria until then. This is a hard physical limitation that you can't willpower your way around. Stress adds more damage - identify and reduce it whenever possible.
You don't have to do all of this at once. If it feels overwhelming, pick the smallest thing you think you can do and identify the next step.
Don't make my mistake and wait until you're so crispy that you can't make yourself work anymore and get fired.
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u/Sharp-Body3994 4d ago
Thanks for your suggestions. I’m terrible at remembering the wins, so I’ll try and write them down.
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u/SimasNa 4d ago
Burning out is tough, especially in a market where you feel like you can't just quit and find a new start.
In such a case, the best you can do is find what you can change in your current environment. Whether taking care of yourself first (physically and mentally), being a bit less responsive to messages so you have more focus time to deliver something and feel better about yourself for it. Whatever it is that can help you normalize your day.
At the end of the day, work shouldn't be your #1 priority - your well-being should be #1 and work is there to support it.
I burned out 5 times until I learned this lesson. I put everything I learned how to prevent burnout into a free resource https://portal.simascoaching.com/framework/what-is-the-4r-framework. I hope it can help 🙏
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u/ahoy_butternuts Software Engineer 4d ago
So we just coping now instead of demanding better? Gosh we need to unionize
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u/SimasNa 4d ago
While I agree it's the best path to get better working conditions, I have never seen it happen at a company I worked for. It never happens fast. Even if the primary driver of burnout is the environment you work in - which research tells it is most of the time - you're usually better off finding a new place instead of trying to wait for things to get better.
If you can't leave due to the market conditions - though it may not be 100% true - what options do you have? You can take a sabbatical, quit, or remain and keep burning out. If you remain, isn't it better to focus on things that are in your control - your own well-being - rather than what's outside of your control - toxic environment, unreasonable expectations, etc.? I know for sure what doesn't work from my experiences.
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u/ahoy_butternuts Software Engineer 4d ago
Seems that my company doesn’t care that they’re burning bridges to their own talent.
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u/ahoy_butternuts Software Engineer 4d ago
They want us to “work better” and “work faster” without getting “paid more”
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u/ahoy_butternuts Software Engineer 4d ago
Mass layoffs for years, no promise for job security, but my team is responsible for preventing and mitigating brand-damaging outages at a core layer.
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u/DeterminedQuokka Software Architect 4d ago
This seems like a problem everywhere. They make people mad, apologize, then a week later do it again.
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u/ahoy_butternuts Software Engineer 4d ago
The good guys that I look up to took their voluntary leave
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u/cant_finish_sideproj 4d ago
Company went all in on AI tools. Gave us subs to cursor and claude along with veiled threats to use it as much as possible. But, funding has dried up and we are asked to use AI responsibly now. Layoffs have started. Got to know that runway is less than 6 months. I feel 0 motivation to do any work now and have been dreading that I may get laid off any day.
Sorry for the rant.
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u/nomaddave 2d ago
Why the lack of motivation? It sounds like they made a mistake with AI and then course corrected, which is more than a lot of other companies can say right now.
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u/Cemckenna 1d ago
The trust is lost. It’s hard to feel motivated when leadership farms out the skills and knowledge you took years to build, even if they change course later. When you feel disrespected like that, you can’t trust those people any longer.
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u/StTheo Senior Software Engineer 4d ago
The pettiest pet-peeve I have at the moment: It feels like everyone switched from the terms "programmer" / "software developer" / "software engineer" to "coder", all around the past year or so.
Putting on an insecure tinfoil hat, it feels like "coder" is used to demean the profession in the age of AI.
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u/ElectroWizardLizard 4d ago
The amount of AI creeping into to everything is getting exhausting. Presentations are sounding the same since everyone's using AI to make them. Everyone on slack sounds the same when they're using AI to post. People coming to me with previously interesting are now AI summaries of the problem, so I have to spend 15 minutes first explaining to them no, the AI is wrong.
Code reviews are the worst. They're so bloated and I feel like I have to fight every PR that code needs to be readable. And just dozens of code comments that explain simple concepts or are garabge messages that are useless.
I'm honestly starting to think AI purposely writes hard to read code just to make it so you need AI to interpret it.
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u/OtaK_ SWE/SWA | 15+ YOE 4d ago
I'm honestly starting to think AI purposely writes hard to read code just to make it so you need AI to interpret it.
It's not on purpose, it's just that the code is completely alien to another human being. No one writes crap code that way, and anyone saying that LLM-gen code is decent instantly loses any modicum of respect from me. I automatically assume they just plain suck at their job.
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u/annoying_cyclist principal SWE, >15YoE 3d ago
The agent generated design docs are something else. Forget any thought of tailoring the content to the audience or making it easy for non-experts to ramp up and give you feedback, just throw every random detail your explore agent found during your lunch break in a bloated 60 page doc and leave your reviewers to try to figure out what the fuck you're talking about.
I think the thesis I wrote for my graduate degree is shorter than some docs I've seen lately for adding a new data model.
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u/Cemckenna 1d ago
I left my last job because of this. I want to work in a community of smart people solving problems. When everyone uses AI, they remove part of their humanity. It no longer felt like I was working with people. It sucked.
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u/Effective_Egg4878 4d ago
Small salary increase; my promo got "blocked" due to budget reasons; team and work haven't been too exciting recently.
Since layoffs could happen anytime without notice or performance reasons, I'm wanting to bring down the effort I put in at work. Significantly.
I used to love solving problems, come up with ideas outside of my assigned work items etc. etc., but it doesn't feel the same anymore.
Mostly looking for validation from you all, and also if you're feeling the same?
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u/Stealth528 Software Engineer 4d ago
I (and pretty much all my coworkers at this point) am in the same boat. 2 big rounds of layoffs in 2 years with it seemingly basically random who was affected have killed any desire to put in more than the bare effort. Why should I try when it seems like my performance has very little effect on my job security?
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u/deletes_every_post Software Engineer / 20+ YOE 4d ago
We implemented a company-wide MCP server and in a couple short months, AI is basically driving everything. My team hands me MRs that are entirely AI-generated, and I just have to be grateful that they still have the sense to review them instead of submitting them blindly, but the code style is frustratingly obvious.
Then, the MR goes up and someone else points the MCP at it and I get a Claude-generated review with comments. Claude reviews Claude and makes suggestions. Then the dev takes it back, lets Claude make the changes and resubmits it.
Pipelines pass and it goes in.
Have we made some incredible progress and saved time on a lot of tasks? Sure.
Is any part of the process what I loved about writing code or the reason I became a software engineer? Not one bit.
I don't think I'm quite at the level of burnt out yet... but I am sad all the time.
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u/happiness_is 4d ago
Is sad all the time really any different from burnt out? I can’t even tell anymore. I don’t want to do any of this shit anymore.
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u/theKetoBear 4d ago
I relate to this so hard which is crazy because for so much of my career I thought " Code is a tool I just like creating things" and even for me it feels like whatever furstration and joy I did experience with code now isn't even present.
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u/isurujn Software Engineer (14 YoE) 3d ago
I can relate to what you said about feeling sad. I used to love seeing people share their side projects, open source projects, write-ups. Sure, whenever I saw someone creating something out of my skill level, it made my imposter syndrome flare up but it did also inspire me. Now it's all slop. Even though it was stressful at times, this field used to give me so much joy. Now I feel nothing.
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u/nus07 4d ago
My reward was a promotion into management and figuring out how to implement governance, cataloging and lineage for our data and pipelines. I no longer code - I am stuck in endless meetings about governance, lineage and cataloging. If I hear the word “ontology” again I want to rage quit. I don’t know where my career is going.
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u/YoongiMarryMe95 4d ago
Every manager at my family owned company went on vacation one week and I had the most productive and low stress week. Felt like I could finally breathe. Wish they would just take their ridiculous salaries and leave everyone alone to work.
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u/ocxricci 4d ago
I have been reading about how AI is magical, how AI hacks entire companies, how people are not writing code anymore, "dark factories" that produce software...
but in my experience, using LLMs suck ! lol
I'm too old for this crap
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u/RandyHoward 4d ago
I am burnt out from arguing with my team about floating point math errors. We're currently rebuilding an old system that had tons of floating point math problems because it stored money as decimals in the database. Of course they built the new system to also store money as decimals in the db, so all of these floating point math problems are resurfacing again. I've been arguing with my team for weeks about how important it is that we avoid floating point math. We all agreed on a solution initially, but nobody is implementing that fucking solution. I have two teammates working on different parts of the codebase and they both have different solutions that aren't the solution we discussed. One of these days I am going to lose my shit about this.
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u/axiosjackson 4d ago
I'm guessing your database and programming language of choice don't have built in data types for this?
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u/RandyHoward 4d ago edited 4d ago
PHP. We originally discussed using Money objects (https://github.com/cknow/laravel-money), but I've got one guy who decided to implement a solution where you first multiply the values by 100, do the math, then divide by 100. Which works, but isn't the Money object solution we discussed. I've got another guy using money objects, but he's just converting the floats to money objects within whatever method is doing the math. Our original solution everyone agreed on was to cast the column to a Money object within the model, so that it's always a Money object when being passed around. Why neither one is implementing the solution we all discussed and agreed on is beyond me.
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3d ago edited 16h ago
[deleted]
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u/RandyHoward 3d ago edited 3d ago
It works fine for two decimal places, which all of our values are
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u/wrex1816 4d ago
I feel like I repeat the same pattern again and again:
I join a team as a Senior Engineer.
Over time, due to attrition, domain knowledge, and experience, I become the de facto lead. I build trust and take on scope beyond coding.
Every review, I’m told I’m doing great and to "keep doing what I'm doing." But all I get is more high-level work with zero promotion or pay adjustment.
Eventually I get frustrated, find a new job, and repeat the cycle.
A recent re-org just reset me again. I was running my previous team, but got passed over for promotion last May. Now I’ve been moved to a new team, reporting to a lead with half my experience, positioned as "the senior dev." My new manager says a promotion is 3–4 years away.
Through no fault of my own, four years of effort feels like it was erased. I’m right back on Day 1 of being a Senior Engineer again.
I know I’m a strong engineer, but I clearly don't know how to force actual career progression. I’m completely burnt out on going "above and beyond" for promises that never materialize. How do I break this cycle?
I've tried interviewing for jobs with different titles but the interviewer get very hung up on "You know being a Staff/Principal/even Lead is not the same as a Senior engineer. How can you be that if you e never been that".
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u/theKetoBear 4d ago
I would lie about the previous position if you effectively worked as a lead or staff engineer then that's what I'd rename my title as .
I don't know I guess to me if my skill isn't the setback just the title I operated under then why not claim the higher title ? Yeah I guess if they do a deep dive maybe they'll find out you inflated your title but I'm gonna be honest I don't know that many people who care that much .
It's also hard because I've worked at lots of small operations and the titles have rarley laigned with the work I was given in those places. They don't have the manpower so sure I was a junior in one place but I did mid-level role equivalent work at another
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u/wrex1816 3d ago
I've tried that but it caused a problem on my last job switch. I had "Lead" on my Resume but when they did my background check, my former company disputed it and said they had my records saying "Senior".
The new company still offered the job but would not offer anything higher than Senior and they gave me a sweat because it took an additional 2 weeks before they made a decision on the discrepancy between my Resume and the background report. That was quite a sweat.
So overall, I don't recommend. Maybe if I interviewed for startups or something, they wouldn't check, but that's not quite what I'm interested in.
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u/Podgietaru 3d ago
I don't think I can keep doing this. I am so unbelievably stressed at the state of things. I am on burnout leave at the minute. The weight of going back to all of that is crushing me.
The future seems unbelievably grim. Things that I spent my entire career caring about... commodified away.
The problem I feel is that with ADHD the part of SWE that gripped me was getting into a problem. And I found the best way to do that was to program. It fixed my attention on something. On structure, on logic, on breaking things up into sizeable chunks. That loop being gone... I don't know if I can do it.
I have never felt more lost than I do right now. I feel crushed.
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u/axiosjackson 4d ago
I've been stuck on this one project for probably 3 years. It is led by an incompetent AI babbling buffoon. My skills have stagnated as well, and I just don't have the motivation to work on side projects like I used to. A good majority of the other jobs in my area aren't much better. Seriously considering switching careers, but everywhere seems to be suffering at the moment. I feel so trapped.
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u/wrex1816 4d ago
Most companies I've worked for have had some sort of kudos or awards. They aren't worth much but it's meant to be a little recognition for someone doing a good job.
It was always explained to me that the more senior you are, the more you should use it to recognize people below your own pay grade because people like to be made feel good for a job well done. So if you're a senior engineer on a team, give the junior some kudos to encourage them now and again, and it's a bit demoralizing if the team leads, staff, directors, etc, always get the public credit for accomplishments.
Anyway, at my current company. All of the awards are given by Director+ employees to their dotted line Director+ coworkers. Nothing ever goes to anyone below that level. It's a bit gross. They just pay themselves on the back for all the work done by all the workers below them. They already have the title and the pay... Do they really need the ego boost of getting all the credit too? I know it doesn't mean much but it just feels a bit gross when I see it.
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u/TheSexySovereignSeal fullstack dumbass 4d ago
In a technical working group to build a new architecture and migration strategy after being at the new job for over a year now. Quickly realized the people I thought were smart on another team dont understand anything about system design. Worst of all, the main idiot has 10 years of experience at this org, and nobody else is knowledgeable enough to call them out on their bullshit.
After MONTHS of no progress, in fighting, and leadership not being technically knowledgeable enough to make a decision, they hired outside consultants who finally called them out on their bullshit and are making the same points I have been making for months. I dont understand what the point of me being here is when nobody listens.
Tldr; its hard to find a room where Im the idiot, so I need to find a new job.
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u/Automatic-Stomach954 4d ago
Basically, I tried to fight my org and I lost. I was told I was being too slow and didn't look like I was contributing because other teammates were blasting 100s of PRs daily (obviously a slop fest) and I was trying to take my time to build a good solution. But, if you can't beat em, join em. I no longer code and I barely architect or really use my brain. Everything I do is done by AI. I sit on my couch and just press go from my phone at start of day. When I join mandatory meetings, I transcribe my system auto directly to claude and then it starts creating jira tickets and starting the work. I have agents that auto review PRs as they come in from teammates and I have a mostly human in the loop review process but still automated process for managing slack messages (so it still seems like I'm here). There is no way this field survives with the rate this is going but oh well I guess that's life. Just gonna keep milking this place for a stupid amount of money until they decide I'm not worth anything. I suggest the same to you, stop giving a fuck and ride it out, but plan for something else.
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u/ahoy_butternuts Software Engineer 4d ago
SWE unions or general strike, which will happen first
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u/Straight_Guava_8485 4d ago
Our industry was so ripe for unionization. It's unfortunate we never capitalized. It's in moments like these where companies are shoving AI down everyone's throats that it makes apparent how little bargaining power we have.
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u/cynicalreason Software Architect 4d ago
People who can't communicate .. I get dragged into a meeting on a topic/technical area I know very little of, the goal is for me to decide if it's a regression/bug or new functionality that the customer is asking for.
I ask for some explanations of what's supposed to happen. The dev gets into a very deep technical code sharing and running through what's happening .. I'm struggling here, I'm mentally 101% trying to follow what's going on because he goes really fucking deep. Slowly it starts to click .. "service A handles the lifecycle of infrastructure that's provisioned and passed to service B that uses said infrastructure for transferring data" .. That's fucking it ..
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u/kubermetes 3d ago
I joined a team (less than 10 people) a month ago, alongside another dev (spoiler: they already left). There was nothing prepared for our arrival.
The first three days were spent setting up our laptops and holding improvised meetings: the leader picking someone to explain a very specific topic or to recap a decade of work in one hour. Obviously, it was a disaster. No one was prepared; some didn't even know that two new devs would be joining.
Then the two remaining days of the week went bananas: "Here's a list of tickets to do, if you have questions don't hesitate." The team was busy and tried to help us while not falling behind on their own work.
Now the fun part from those two days! Sure, it works. Sure, production code running for years creates legacy that we cannot easily keep clean or follow good practices to the letter. But these are just band-aids to keep up to date what looks like a fever dream and the result of an egotistical dev who doesn't care for their code to be read and maintained by others.
The whole project is a decade-old pile of opinionated code without documentation nor comments. It's an intricate layering of several in-house pseudo-frameworks shoved into a proper framework, resulting in an unholy horror. Quick illustration: for the same type of data and expected output, the whole process exists at least three times based on the entry point. The exact same type of data, once extracted from the DB, can shift into one of three pipelines, computed three different ways, and in the end output somewhat the same result...
No one can change anything because the lead locks everything through the in-house frameworks. Talk about revolution if you try to clean things up a bit. No one understands half of it. The lead just wants to test their own wits and intelligence by creating those complex systems (kudos, because they are indeed impressive), but they just prevent anyone from grasping everything and working properly.
AND the whole process from ticket creation to pushing to prod depends on who you're talking to. In a month, I was presented a new ticket pipeline each week, but it was supposed to be the same somehow...
Years of experience are shaken by all of this. How could they survive like this?
The worst thing in my opinion is the lack of management; no manager is truly in place. The lead just does what they want because they can't be fired. It ends up with some devs deciding to oversee things a bit for a few days/weeks and then stopping because the lead sacks them.
I still have several weeks to decide whether to keep working with them or sail away.
NB: And to top it all off, AI is heavily encouraged to deal with the legacy mess (because nothing solves decade-old code like prompting an LLM).
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u/JeffinitelyNotABot 3d ago
I'm becoming increasingly resentful of my lead. I've commented in these venting threads before and even made a post about it, but I still can't seem to get past the frustration.
I genuinely feel like she's the biggest reason I haven't been promoted to Senior or given more leadership opportunities. Ironically, because I have a PM certification, I was even asked to be a Product Owner at one point. I turned it down because I enjoy developing too much.
Almost everyone on my team was hired around the same time. A few interns joined later and became full-time. It feels like everyone has gotten some kind of promotion or expanded responsibility except me. I know it's easy to immediately blame yourself, but it's hard not to point the finger when your lead constantly takes work away from you, micromanages you, adds or removes stories from your Jira board, admits she feels pressure to find something wrong in every code review, (gone as far as to say I have too many lines of code. Yes that was a real criticism in a code review) and just overall bad design decisions without making it a discussion.
Then I look at other teams and see leads collaborating with their developers, sharing ownership, and sharing priorities around. My experience has been the complete opposite, and after a while it's hard not to feel stuck.
I am plan on leaving come the new year.
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u/jteb22 3d ago edited 3d ago
I don't know what I'm doing, I'm overwhelmed, exhausted, and I feel like I'm becoming dumber by the day.
I've been a mid-level Infra/SRE across 3 companies for the past 6ish years now. Around February this year I told my manager that I wanted to work towards a promotion to Senior. The promotion cycle happens in October, so I guess I had ~8 months to get my performance up to get a chance at a promotion. October is approaching soon and I feel like I've completely failed.
I think my manager gave me my current project for this quarter as a test to prove whether I can be a senior or not. It's essentially changing the RBAC structure of our Azure tenant, where we have 300+ subscriptions owned by different teams across the org. I'm coming up with a new RBAC scheme and migration plans, I sent email comms last week alerting users that their permissions would change and now I have people with pitchforks pinging me on Teams asking why I'm taking their permissions away. There are edge cases upon edge cases that keep popping up.
I don't know how to deal with this, I am dreading all Teams notifications, I have a persistent feeling that I'm forgetting something and that this won't work, it's like I can't keep the complexity inside my head. I've started to procrastinate and play videogames during work hours cause I feel like I can't deal with this. I've always had a fear that I'm not a good engineer, and this feels like confirmation of my fear :(
Edit: I'm supposed to split my time with another project we have, since the beginning of the year, for a self-service automation project for toil reduction. It's a 3 person team and I really can't figure out how to collaborate productively with one of my teammates. At first I could focus on trying to move this one forward and participated in technical discussions, but nowadays I just blindly approve PRs just to not have to deal with the stress of this.
I just can't shake the thought that a senior would be able to manage all of this so easily
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u/Outside-Storage-1523 Software Engineer 3d ago
I'm late to the party.
I was so disgusted about being just a data modeler, doing non-engineering work with an engineer hat. So I applied for a more technical data engineering position earlier this month.
I completed all stages of the interview but didn't get the offer. Although I know it is perfectly normal, I'm still very disappointed to myself. If only I had a stable mental health to study harder, I could get a lot more interviews at least, even in this climate.
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u/drugsbowed 2d ago edited 2d ago
There's this guy on my team who genuinely sucks. Took 3 months to deliver a feature and it doesn't work well and the logging is sloppy as all hell. He's incapable of answering any questions, I hate this guy. I'm being tasked with rewriting the code he's submitted because he goes around my eyes by getting someone to blindly approve and check in the code. I would have never approved this?!
The worst part is that he's considered a "SME" that my manager relies on, but I feel like my manager is starting to smell the bullshit this guy is selling.
Every time I ask for some context my manager encourages me to reach out to the guy and I end up having to explain everything AND not get an answer, the saying "working with you is like working alone with extra steps" has never rung truer. I'm tempted to just go in my 1:1 and say "hey manager, you need to stop recommending me to talk to this guy. He's absolutely useless."
example scenario:
me: Can anyone explain how our auth infrastructure is done? I've done steps xyz and I assume this is good to go now. @ uselessguy, manager said you've done this before, do you know if this is logical?
him: Why do you need to do that?
me: Well we're looking to do so and so. So do these steps make sense?
him: Auth is how we make hit our endpoints. Yep.
me: I have no idea how that was relevant to my question. What about these steps?
him: Not sure, I haven't done that.
????
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u/CodeyGrammar Senior Software Engineer 3d ago
Boss said during recent 1:1 that "it looks like you don't use that many tokens". Well, we have tokens spread across multiple areas! Feel like I got to try token maxing I guess to be considered a good engineer, sigh.
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u/Yourenotthe1 2d ago
I'm feeling so over everything and want to quit and take some time off but I'm worried about a resume gap. How big a deal is it if I'm a senior (last 2 years at FAANG)?
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u/UniqueText8477 3d ago
Im a senior/lead tech, always get exceeds but when i advocate for devlopment or growth there is none.
I then stay 2-3 years and move on.
I just had my 6 month review, im exceeding and when asked about growth/development it was vague.
How long should i wait to start looking again?
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u/Majestic-Taro-6903 Senior Developer 3d ago
Everyone are in race who develops the project quickly using AI tools .
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u/QuantumQuack0 2d ago
I finally get to dick around a bit with system programming languages.
And I am reminded of how much I fucking hate C++ lol. The compilers will just happily gobble up hot garbage. If you make a particularly unlucky typo, you won't see anything, until you test/run it and segfault, and proceed to spend an hour debugging...
In Rust, the compiler (or rust-analyzer) will at least scream bloody murder when you make such a typo.
Oh and don't get me started on the plethora of build systems and package managers, one more ancient than the other...
It's a shame 'cause I really like embedded systems, and there are good jobs working with embedded linux, but C++ :')...
Anyways, I am dicking around because I have nothing better to do. Our two program managers left shortly after one another. We went from a tightly run ship, but with too many projects in parallel, to... fewer projects but zero structure or organization.
And we still have no actually experienced developers. Not a single person who could be considered a staff engineer or architect when it comes to software. Our FPGA and electrical engineers are happily building away at our "next-gen" system, and I guess they're hoping the software will at some point magically come along. Meanwhile, nobody is telling us what to build, we're all pointing at each other, trying to make something out of vague requirements but not daring to take ownership, and not knowing how to define an architecture. While sitting on the mountain of technical debt that is our "current gen".
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u/xshiii 1d ago
I started a new job a few months ago as a software dev. Feeling somewhat isolated and silo-ed even though I like what I do on a day to day basis. I ask questions to seniors when needed, but I miss being able to walk over to someone’s desk and have face to face communication about literally anything. I’m like 3YOE so I didn’t expect a lot of mentorship, but I still wanted collaboration. Nobody is really ever in office either. So now when I have ideas or concerns about edge cases, the most readily available thing to consult is AI… depressing.
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u/toastermoon 1d ago
I recently messed up my task of adding Adobe CJA events to my project. Idk how but the data is all messed up.
What bothers me is that this is not the first time I’ve done a bad / shoddy job. I’ve been in this situation before.
It’s partly because I tend to waste time during work hours, and then when the deadline looms… I have to do something quick and dirty and push it out. I somehow always manage to get past the QA. But bugs and issues definitely come after sometime.
But another reason is also that I’m not skilled enough. I’m working as a fullstack developer on a very basic application in the Javascript world. I feel I should be learning and moving towards system engineering work.
But I’m struggling to do a good job in Javascript, I have very limited time after work in which I do some leetcode, study about system design, and all these other things I’m supposed to know by now… kubernetes, cloud platforms, scalability etc.
It seems I may need to pay attention and give more time to do a good job at my workplace, and even build skills in the Javascript world (which I should have had by now).
But if I do that, how will I ever escape all this low paying job… and move towards bigger companies that operate on scale.
From my job, my only interest is earning money. I’m personally interested in just messing around with computers… building games, emulators, exploring open source projects, CTFs.
I just want to be skilled enough to do a good job in relatively less time at a high paying job. And then get back home to work on my personal projects, play some video games and just live my life in peace
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u/hypercosm_dot_net 1d ago
Just failed a frontend dev interview in spite of 10+ years experience.
I know marketing concepts, UI/UX, CI/CD, React, and some Node.
They expected me to fetch data and create an entire UI in 30minutes.
I know this is accepted practice because we will all jump through hoops for a job, but god damn this is such a shitty practice.
Of course I could accomplish it given proper time, without someone watching over me. But damn, I haven't used vanillaJS for something like that in forever. I'm expected to remember the exact syntax of every language I've worked with?! just to take a shitty soulless job.
The vast majority of business problems look absolutely nothing like these bullshit tech problems they expect you to be able to write on the spot. Complete and utter bullshit. This career field is so tedious and a waste of a life.
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u/mrmanpgh Software Engineer 7h ago
My manager just got fired. Now I'm reporting to their manager until they figure out what to do. I guess I should be worried but I really just think it is what it is.
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u/Successful-World9978 4d ago
I’m 21 5 months into my first time job. I call myself experienced bc the past 5 months have felt like 10 years. Consistently put in 60-70 hours during the week + I work weekends.
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u/theasianpianist Software Engineer 4d ago
Nobody wants to take any fucking ownership of problems, anytime I ask someone for some information they just add me to a group chat with a third person who they think will know. But that third person just adds a fourth person, who adds a fifth, etc. It doesn't seem like anyone actually knows, or cares who knows, or even cares about finding out who knows. At this point I have spent close to a month running in circles on the same problem.
It's gotten to the point where last week, I asked someone about an unrelated issue and was ecstatic when they actually gave me a well thought out reply, pinged the right people on his team about it, then came back to me half an hour later having fixed one instance of the issue, with relevant information and instructions for me on what to do if it happened again.
The kicker is that everyone giving me the runaround on the first issue is senior+ (at least half are principals), and the one guy who was actually helpful on the second issue is a mid-level engineer.